


rise

by newbie1990



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: (although tbh finn & rey are co-leads), Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Finn-centric, Food Issues, Gen, Institutional Abuse, Jedi Finn, Jedi Rey, Past Abuse, Protective Rey (Star Wars), abuse recovery, but we also deal w/ rey's, tbh they're all just trying to look after one another, the main focus is finn's trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-28 12:47:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10101431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newbie1990/pseuds/newbie1990
Summary: finn-centric (w/ some rey pov). finn learns how to balance being a jedi and still being himself as he deals with the aftermath of everything the first order put him through.





	

she gets to the island and all luke says it that he feels they need to return, and so she doesn’t question it because finn’s there, finn who is, right now, everything she’s hoped for and everything she’s most afraid of. finn in a hospital bed, finn who *will not be* taken away from her.

and it doesn’t happen the days she spends by his bedside, telling him the stories she used to tell herself when the wind whistled cold in jakku and she wanted so much to sleep.

it doesn’t even happen when he finally, *finally* wakes and she leaps up to hug him and they won’t let her, he’s too fragile, and she’s torn between yelling at them and yelling at herself.

the days he struggles to stand, to walk, and she’s right there the whole time. and some days poe’s there too, and they talk about flight and about finn and she laughs at how starry his eyes go and he teases her right back. she’s not used to this, used to comfortable, used to hope. it makes the breath freeze in her chest like the beginning of winter.

it happens the day luke comes to the infirmary for the first time since finn started walking again, since they all started huddling together and sharing rations, poe insisting they try this and this and this so her mouth was bursting with colour after so much time choking on grey.

and she…she wants him to go. she pushes it down but she doesn’t want everything she’s seen on the holovids, the calm and the quiet and the loneliness. she just wants this.

and luke stares at finn for five long moments and says, ‘you have it.’

you’d think that would mean she’d got everything she wanted. it didn’t.

~

finn has a problem with authority. the wrong kind of problem, the kind of problem where you’ve spent your whole life since you were five staying in line, staying in line, because a toe out of place might get sliced off, burned off, might send someone else spinning off into oblivion.

staying in line was never enough. he could learn how to keep his head down, how to salute and how not to smile, but he could never learn how to not run to the aid of a fallen soldier, to not help them up. he could never learn not to sneak back rations to slip the days he wasn’t allowed to eat.

he could never, ever learn not to feel, and he still doesn’t know how they knew that.

and here, here is where everything is right, where everything the first order said about justice and law and stability, everything phasma told him exasperated about how this would protect people when he’d been through five levels of shock treatment and he still wouldn’t *stop* - here’s where it’s all true. they’re saving people. every day lives are at risk, and here, surely, here he *needs* to stay in line. here it matters so much more.

and so finn tries not to take too many rations (there’s only so much to go around, right, he has to stay in peak condition), and it’s only because poe’s devoted his life to making sure finn and rey try every food in the galaxy and finn can’t tell him no that he’s learning what it is to not be hungry. it feels like weak, it feels like lazy and not good enough.

and so he works and he works and he works, and he reads the jedi code until the words blur and his head aches, and he - he can do this. jedis want peace. that’s easy. he wants peace so badly.

(it’s only when anything, anyone he loves is threatened that it drowns out the force and the peace and the calm.)

~

here’s the thing: jedis don’t have attachments. finn has nothing but.

jedis don’t fall in love.

(jedis don’t laugh and make stupid jokes the way finn does. jedis aren’t all the things she loves about him.

jedis don’t fight for no reason or steal food late at night because there’s food here, there’s food here, calm down rey, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s - )

jedis aren’t them, but they are jedis.

~

he’s trying. he’s trying so hard luke takes his arm and tries to tell him it’s okay, but surely ‘it’s okay’ means he’s failing. he’s never had kindness before, only stillness when he did the right thing, when he did what he was *supposed* to do, and so much pain whenever he didn’t.

he doesn’t know how this works, how the resistance can survive and still tell him it’s okay he can never switch off the way jedis are supposed to, the way they’re supposed to shut down the anger and the fear and everything so constantly bubbling inside of him.

he’s used to shutting out light, but now he’s trying to hide the darkness, to wrap up the wounds he carries beneath his skin before they see the blood.

there’s so much he doesn’t talk about, and he wishes rey and poe hadn’t learned him so well, that rey didn’t act like the force was just another tool, another weapon, didn’t use it to peer at the pain following him like a cloud.

they sit him down and they never stop until he’s spilling out nightmares where all he does is wake up, back in his bunk, blood on his hands all over him - rey’s blood and poe’s blood and -

‘you’d never do that. you’d never have stayed,’ says rey, and their eyes are fixed on him and how can they have so much *faith*?

but there’s so much, so much not even those evenings and mornings spent huddled together over poe’s cooking (jessika’s cooking, although they’re not supposed to know because she and poe have reputations to maintain) can begin to reach the bottom of it.

he’s drowning. he’s drowning and the force should be the light on the surface of the water but instead it’s just trapping him beneath layers of things he’s supposed to be.

~

‘wait,’ says rey, ‘wait - you’re telling me we’re not allowed to fall in love?’

rey has arguments and examples and *han and leia*, excuse me, and finn just has this dull ache.

~

he’s tearing himself apart for this, and she can see, but - the force can’t fix this. and force in one way or another is all she’s known.

she knows finn. she knows poe, and she knows him well enough to trust him when he tells her to let it go, to trust him with finn. trust him with finn. like he’s hers. (he is.)

and she wants to argue with him, to tell him she’s trying so much less, to tell him how the force can feel like light and joy and power dancing between your palms, the way she can send forks spinning towards her, make finn laugh when she suspends pillows in the air and calls it juggling, steal food from halfway across the cafeteria.

it’s life, and life is beautiful and dazzling and opening up in front of her and as much as sometimes she wants to curl into a ball because it’s too much, how can all of this possibly be hers, she also needs to snatch it before anyone can take it away.

but finn, he - he tries the exercises luke sets for them until his hands cramp, he only tells her about his nightmares if hers have woken her too. she whispers to him about waking up in the desert, cold and alone, and he tells her things that make her chest ache. she curls around him and he stays so still and tells her, again, that bullshit about sacrifice and loneliness. she wants to scream but she can’t, she can’t (she tried once, twice, too many times and he just stared at her like he’d done this so many times before).

‘i’ve been lonely my whole life, and so have you.’ he’s frowning, still. ‘it’s for warmth, okay? you remember how hot it was on jakku, i need the warmth.’

he gives her a smile because no matter how hard he tries he’s finn, he’s fucking finn and nothing will ever come between him and his friends, his heart.

it’s his saving grace. (it’s his achilles heel, his worst weakness, and he can’t figure out whether the fact he’s heard this so many times before from cold empty bitter mouths makes it more or less true.)

~

the thing is - he knows what the force looks like unchecked. it’s messy and it’s ugly, it’s smashing up control rooms and the troopers sent to fix it up muttering under their breath. and he knows he’s a million miles from ren, but ren is everything he’s fighting against, everything he stands against, and he - if you’re going to be the opposition, you should oppose, you should be as opposite as possible.

‘that’s just word games, finn,’ says poe.

‘you really think i’m in control?’ says rey, catching a pillow from across the room, sending it falling onto poe’s head.

he closes his eyes. he thinks about his own small self, he thinks about han falling, he thinks about the hundreds of times he’s been told it’s okay, it’s okay, we’re all angry, but they’re - they’re not jedis. the resistance is so small and so fragile, and no-one ever quite says it but he and rey and luke are the best hope they’ve got.

maybe poe can want to tear kylo ren’s face off and blow first order ships to smithereens, send stormtroopers spiralling out through space, but he has to be - he has to be -

he remembers when they told him he was on track to become a general, that he’d have lives in his hands, how he wasn’t supposed to notice that, wasn’t supposed to care, and now there are galaxies in his hands and he’s supposed to notice and not notice all at the same time.

‘compassion is a good thing,’ says luke, as he teaches them to be still and quiet and utterly empty.

compassion, for finn, leaks into every damn thing he does. he can’t lock it up and use it to weigh the best decisions. it’s what he lives by and breathes by and he can’t - and even if he could, there’s the fear crushing his chest when he thinks about the gleam of red on snow, of rey’s crumpled body, the anger that burns through him because they nearly took her, because they did take him, because han fell a thousand feet and one time he heard rey and poe talking about how it felt to have kylo ren’s hands in your head, tugging at your thoughts like messy innards, he can’t - he can’t just *forget*.

(he won’t. he won’t forget. he’ll remember slip and the screams he heard standing right there with his blaster loose in his hands and from distance no sound could cross. he’ll remember and his anger will burn so bright, so bright the fear is only shadows, only tricks of the light. and he’ll burn their kingdom down.

there are times, now, that he believes that, that no amount of recitation of codes can keep this from flaring up in him. if he has anger it’s because he has a right to it. compassion is strength, is so much strength. compassion is why his anger is so, so different to ren’s, so different it’s laughable anyone can think otherwise.

there are times he catches rey up in a hug and spins her round and laughs and only just stops himself from lifting her high, so high, so high she can see the whole base and shriek and laugh, dizzy with it. there’s magic between them.)

and then he’s five again, ten again, fifteen again. there’s so much the first order didn’t take from him. there’s so much they *did*.

~

rey is learning, slower perhaps than finn is (rey wouldn’t stay up a whole night until she can do this *just* right, rey wouldn’t go through the resistance library finding everything she could. rey’s the one that wakes up at four o’clock to find finn still awake and drags him to bed, the one that brings him food when he reads through lunchtime and pushes as poe pulls him out of the door. rey’s the one who insisted that jedis should share quarters, should learn together, and finn’s the one that allowed it because that’s who they are).

rey is learning and rey is watching the shapes of the force behind her eyelids, listening to it whisper as she sleeps. she can tell poe what he’s thinking, can murmur too-close lies in his ear. and she can feel it, shifting beneath her feet. she and finn are the lynchpin, the cornerstone, but it’s humming away throughout all of them, throughout poe owning the sky, acting like gravity’s nothing and machines can do ballet, through battle plans and every note finn’s made about protocol and practices that they’re all instructed on now, learning weaknesses. she can feel it. they can win.

and she can feel this too. she takes finn’s hand. ‘listen to me. it’s really easy, you can listen now or i can tell you over and over and the force can tell you and poe can tell you and luke can tell you, but - we’re better together. we’re not…the force was gone for so long - i know, not gone, shut up - we’re not like them. we’re different. that’s how we win. we’re better together, finn. and i know you can feel it too.’

it’s all around them, perfumed air, and he feels it, she knows he does, but - he swallows, licks his lips. ‘the code - okay, fine,’ he rolls his eyes, ‘not the code - for a jedi you really hate the code, rey - but…we need to win. how do we know this’ll work?’

‘we try.’ her eyes are shining and he can feel the power and the beauty and the love around them. it’s like a song, like a sunset, it’s the clearest the force has been and he knows the force now, knows it scarily well, but this is - so bright.

it’s so bright but - but codes, but books - but people, dying, planets, rey bleeding and poe screaming and things that haven’t happened but - but every time he’s failed - ‘we try.’ she’s watching him with her eyes wide and earnest and…and okay.

‘show me.’ books and codes can be swept away so easily, hysterical laughter and greasy fingers and poe’s warm hugs that smell like oil and sweat and how he can make rey smile when she wakes up gasping - the death, everything, she opens up her mind and their grief and rage merge into one, the two of them standing there, trying so hard to stand between death and the universe, life flowing between them, tangling around them, how has he not noticed how *alive* everything is - and hey, and *hey*, finn, you saved us, remember, remember how you saved us both, remember how i saved you right back. and she remembers poe’s drunken stories about how finn was the greatest shot in the galaxy and finn’s ‘come on, man, you - i mean, *you*, man, this guy, what a pilot’, but she can see them, now, laughing in a TIE fighter, dizzy and joyful with the purest of relief. and she remembers finn mocking kylo, talking so quietly and fiercely about his efforts, but now she sees him in the blazing light and the snow, you *idiot*, why didn’t you tell me how brilliant you were (no-one does that, rey).

and. and. every time you’ve *failed*? you. saved. us. all. *knucklehead*. and she breathes. and there he is, the picture of him in rey’s head, the one who came back. he’s the brightest thing in there, he glows so hot it’s like a sun, and he’d tease her but he’s too busy smiling.

(remember how - remember how i saved you too, remember you’re not ever alone in this, i’m here too, finn, i’m here too, poe’s here and i’m here and *you don’t have to win this alone*, we can save you *back*.)

and the warmth spills over her, i’m not leaving, we’re not leaving, we’re doing this, we’re trying, we’re winning. and he can breathe, he’s broken through the water and this is the light, the sunshine in his eyes.


End file.
